Ruined Soil

[grannysprouts]

This was the first weekend in months when it was nice enough to go out and start turning up my new garden space. We rent you see and finally earned enough respect from our landlord to turn up a 10x10 spot in the yard for a garden. However, what we found was abour three inches of soil on top of a landfill. I was so sad, mad, dissapointed. There are charcol pieces, roofing scraps, plastic wal-mart bags, broken beer bottles and just generally discarded crap all through the soil. We will only be here another year I hope. So I guess I will have to container garden this year. I am pretty sure that this soil can't be saved. But let's say that I find a piece of land and go to digging and find the same thing, would there be anyway to purify the soil and make it safe for growing our food? I use to own land and found pockets of discarded things but I had enough land that I could just ignore this. (Thinking that I would always be on that land it was a clean up project that was going to be ongoing). :(

[bee_pipes]

Wow! You have my condolences. The only thing I would trust is a raised bed with a barrier between the bottom of the bed and the ground below. I lived in a place called MiraMesa, in San Diego county. It was old San Diego land fill - you didn't dare go digging too deeply in the ground. The rich folk lived on the other side of hwy 163 - it wasn't old landfill - it was old impact area for Mirimar Air Station - rains were constantly uncovering old ordinance. Hard to tell who had it worse - I guess the rich folk got first pick.

Regards,
Pat